The trials and tribulations, joys and challenges of adoptive parenting.

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We are really proud of you the way you have started to make some changes in your life, and we have had glimpses of the happier Billy we used to know. This weekend was, however, very difficult and exhausting. It was good to have a more normal night’s sleep on Friday, but then you spent most of Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights awake. For most of the time during the day you were in bed or asleep, even missing Jo’s birthday tea on Sunday. There was no opportunity to have a proper conversation with you, and you became increasingly angry and abusive. Refusing to return to your digs on Monday as planned made the situation worse, and meant that you could not attend your course. You left your room in a terrible state, with no attempt to clear up any of the mess.

If you want to come back here again there need to be some real changes.

You must be engaged in education, work or training for at least 15 hours a week, or at least have evidence in the form of a letter or email confirming a start date to do one of these things.

You need to get more help to deal with underlying anger issues. It is up to you how you go about this – whether you go back to your GP and ask for help again, follow up the idea of seeing a counsellor, do some work around the origins of your anger with the practitioner we saw on Friday, follow up Teens in Crisis, or try something else. Again we need to see actual evidence that you have definite arrangements in place. We will pay for therapy if necessary, but it is also possible to ask for funding from the post-adoption fund to cover any costs.

When at home you need to sleep during the night and be up during the day, eat downstairs and be generally more engaged with the rest of the family. You are not to stay in your room all day, just coming down to grab some food. If all you want to do is play on your X-Box, you can do that in the hostel, or elsewhere. We do not want the X-Box coming back here again for that reason. If you are working or studying you too will need a good night’s sleep, as do the rest of the family.

We expect you to keep your bedroom and bathroom in a decent state, with rubbish in the bin, dirty clothes in the laundry basket – or bring them down to wash, and the room left in a state in which I can get in to clean.

We expect you to be polite, and will not accept abusive and threatening language, whether addressed to us or to anyone else.

In terms of the first point, actually committing yourself to some form of activity, you have a week or so before colleges and offices close for the Easter break. If you are thinking of coming back over the Easter holidays at all you have a small window of time to organise yourself.

With love,

Mum and Dad

I decided not to say anything about the hours of tearful girlfriend Billy said he loved, made feel special – who desperately loved him, who he unceremoniously dumped, or the unkind Facebook posts and trashing of his room – one step at a time. There is a long way to go, starting with dealing with his anger and the causes of his anger. Whether one can do anything about a lack of empathy I really don’t know. By the time Billy and girlfriend went on Tuesday (they should have gone Sunday or Monday at the latest) I was exhausted and traumatised by the sheer volume of negative energy and vitriol that had been unleashed. Feeling desperately sorry for the girlfriend, who is almost certainly better off without him, but who is so vulnerable herself.

One sometimes hears that bereavement is the most stressful event in many people’s lives, followed by moving house. The thing that sends my stress levels through the roof is children refusing to go to school. Both kids have done this for prolonged periods, making full-time paid work impossible for me. This evening we should have been taking both children back to school but the signals from Jo were not promising. It started early afternoon with complaints about feeling sick and generally unwell. Spending the weekend in the dark playing on her computer or lying in bed with an iPad while snacking can’t help the digestion or headaches. She insisted that this was not the problem. Not taking a very long shower (an hour plus) was another bad sign, as was the fact that at 5pm she was still in her nighty, which she’s been wearing all day. Bringing her English prep to me about the time we were due to leave was a good sign, but was quickly followed by a return to bed and refusal to speak to anyone. My body was pumping adrenaline and I was feeling homicidal by this point, trying hard to maintain a calm exterior. I took Billy back to college (two and a half hours round trip) as he was already sitting in the car having a cigarette. I can’t see his tobacco supply lasting the week. I didn’t want to be in the house with Jo as years of school refusal have taken their toll on my nerves. Although feeling exhausted, at least taking Billy offered me the prospect of some time to myself in the car on the return journey. Walking into the kitchen on arriving home to find a new load of dishes and pans sitting by the sink didn’t improve my mood. Nor did discovering that Tony had not informed Jo’s housemaster that she wouldn’t be returning tonight. He had apparently had a rather odd conversation with a duty member of staff in Billy’s old school, who had eventually asked him which school he thought he was talking to. I have given Tony the phone number of Jo’s housemaster numerous times, and he could also have googled it. It is not the events in themselves that get to me, so much as continually having to take responsibility for others – I feel the need of some downtime. If I were an animal right now it would be a prickly hedgehog.

The problem is that for years, pretty much all her school career, we have struggled to get Jo to go to school. If we thought home education could work we would have tried it, but she is a non-co-operator and would have simply spent her entire life in bed. As an infant we could use physical force to get her dressed and into school. Once there if not happy, she did not generally appear unhappy, and she is a very sociable child, loyal to her friends, funny and good company. The middle primary school years were particularly hard as she was big enough to resist getting dressed or getting into the car, and out of it again at the other end. We might resort to force – extracting her from the foot-well of the car where she had jammed herself, then locking the car doors, for instance. Until the end of Year 5 I would then have to give her a piggyback across the playground to the school entrance. This process, which started with waking her up about 7am, often took till lunchtime, making a normal working life impossible. I would just have time to go home, have something to eat and walk the dogs, before it was time to pick the kids up again. To say that she has problems with transitions is an understatement. I loved my job, parts of it anyway, and it was good to be in adult company, but finding the time and energy for challenging children and a career was a nightmare.

There have been periods of weeks or months more recently when we began to think that Jo’s difficulty in getting into school was behind us, but sadly not. This is the second time in the last three school nights that we have been unable to get her there. When this happens it is rare that she makes it in on Monday, wiping out Monday for doing anything else, but she generally surfaces by Tuesday – taking out most of Tuesday as well. On the last difficult Sunday, the last week of the Autumn Term, she did eventually get dressed, and her bags were all packed and in the car. It got too late for Tony to come along and share the driving as he had to be up early Monday morning for work. Jo eventually came outside and to stop her going in again I locked the house. She stalked off round the side, in a well-entrenched pattern of behaviour – when little she would run into the garden and hide just as we were about to leave. I sat and waited in a cold dark car. Nothing. Eventually she returned and tried the front door, realised it was locked and went back into the garden. After about an hour in the car I had a phone call from her on my mobile (cell phone) to say that she was in the house. I had to admire her determination, which has never been in short supply. In pitch darkness she had manoeuvred a very large ladder from the far side of the house onto the decking, and up to my study window, then climbed in, leaving the windows wide open on a bitterly cold night. She was back in her bedroom and had no intention of moving. It was about 11pm by this time, and although the school had been alerted and said they would let us in when we arrived, I wasn’t up to a long drive there and back again by that point. One-nil to Jo! I revel in the fact that the children can now put themselves to bed, as bedtimes were awful, but it will be so good when we no longer have to persuade reluctant children to go to school, for them as well as for us.